Semantics and Some Problems of Ontology

Abstract

A connection is sometimes made between problems of semantics and some of the philosophical problems of ontology. Sometimes the two are even mistaken for each other, which results in confusion and a standpoint that has rightly been called ‘semantic philosophy’. The problems of the world are confused with the problems of language and its interpretation. The problems of the world, be they finding solutions to social conflicts or theoretical mappings of individual domains, cannot be solved by the means furnished by semantics. The tasks of semantics are, as Tarski put it in his criticism of such aspirations [149], much more limited and more modest. So semantics cannot replace sociology, social politics, and become an instrument of ‘social therapy’, as some of the adherents of general semantics would have it, but nor can it replace any of the special sciences or philosophy or the theory of cognition. An in-depth criticism of these false aspirations, which are to the detriment not only of the solutions to any of these deserving problems, but also of semantics itself, is beyond the purview of the present work.